Little Exiles

by Robert Dinsdale

  George breathes, soft and steady. He has to think — but, fuck them, they never let you think. They haven’t let you think since you were eight years old, without a birthday or even a name to call your own.

  He takes his time. Judah Reed can wait.

  When you were a little boy, he thinks, your best friend ran away. You woke in the night and you had soaked the sheets with your own piss, like the pathetic little bastard you were. Later that day, when someone ratted you out, you took a beating for it. But, when you thought your best friend was running away again, God help you, you had an idea. You tugged on a man in black’s sleeve: Jon Heather is leaving the Mission, you said. He’s got a friend at a station, and he’s leaving tonight; he’s leaving right now!

  There are things in life for which you will be sorry forever. You cannot take them back and you cannot make them right. It is like the piece of grit lodged under your flesh: it doesn’t hurt, but you feel it still. This, George decides, will not be one of those times.

  ‘He was silent at first. Then he cried and cried. I stayed up with him until he’d cried himself out.’

  Judah Reed might even be pleased. ‘And Australia?’

  ‘Frightened,’ George lies, ‘but he’ll come around. It’s the best thing for him, in the end, isn’t it?’

  ‘We wouldn’t do it for them, if it wasn’t,’ he says. ‘We are not a society of monsters.’

  In the corridor outside, George freezes. At the very end of the passage, Charlie is waiting, his back pressed against the wall.

  ‘Mr Slade,’ he says, nervously. ‘I thought you’d forgotten. You said we could do more …’

  ‘Of course,’ George answers. ‘The story awaits!’ He puts his arm around the boy and guides him from the corridor. ‘But you must do me a favour, Charlie. One favour, and then all the stories in the world!’

  ‘Yes, Mr Slade?’

  George crouches and ruffles the boy’s hair. ‘Never call me Mr Slade again, Charlie. My name is Mr Stone.’ He stops. ‘Or you could always just call me George.’

  They climb the stairs to the playroom above, passing dormitories where boys lounge and make mischiefs of their own. In two months, a ship sails from Liverpool harbour, and all of these boys will be gone.

  The old wisdom is right: the childsnatcher does not have to come in the dead of night; he is, George reflects, already here.

  XV

  Pete stands on a bank of red dirt and grass, on the edge of the highway. Behind him, sweet smells rise like mist from the waters of a marsh hidden by walls of thick reeds. Finches, scarlet red and tiny as his thumb, flutter through the air. He looks nervously along the highway, as if he can’t bear the thought of taking another step. Where the road banks left, a great mound of red rock rises like a slag heap. All the way to its zenith, scrub huddles and clings.

  He has come this far. He can’t back out now.

  It is a new house whose steps he shuffles towards, a timber frame and whitewashed walls, with a trellis where nothing is growing, and piles of dirt where the excavations have yet to be smoothed over.

  He slides back a screen door and knocks. There — it is done. He takes a step back, finds himself praying that nobody is in; one more day, and he might be ready. They could make a camp outside town. There must be fish thronging the river.

  The door draws back and, standing there, is a girl, no more than five years old. When the sun catches her brown hair, it shines the colour of rust.

  She squints at him.

  ‘What’s your name?’ he asks.

  ‘Elizabeth,’ she says, kicking from one foot to another.

  ‘I wonder, Elizabeth — is your mother home?’

  The girl nods, shyly.

  ‘Could you fetch her for me?’ The girl turns to slip back into the house. ‘You can tell her …’ he whispers. ‘You can tell her it’s your Uncle Pete.’

  In the ute, Jon Heather picks at his nails with the end of a blade.

  Kununurra is a small town, with a handful of houses still under construction. Further along the river, where a makeshift jetty has been erected, there are canvas shacks, permanent bivouacs for the men who are coming to build the dam. It is work that might suit Jon Heather — long hours and good pay — a place to be anonymous and win back some of the money he so uselessly poured into this ute.

  Suddenly he slips, digging the blade of the knife deep into the flesh around his thumb nail. Consciously, he zones back in on what Megan is saying.

  ‘… I suppose I did always want a sister. When I was a girl, I’d ask Mum about it, over and over. Dad had to shut me up. If Mum had lived, I think they would have wanted to give me a sister …’

  Jon Heather imagines what it will be like, when he sees his own sisters again. They will be ten years and more older, they will probably have children, just the same as Rebekkah, but they will still be his sisters.

  All of this reminds him how little he has. There has been precious little work in the weeks since they left Broome, just enough to tide them over while they kept out of sight. Megan found work waiting tables in a road station, while Pete and Jon dammed a stream with some locals — but that was barely enough to feed them. Every day, Pete talked about what it would be like to find his sister, so much so that it might almost have been as if they had been spending the last years saving to get here, not slaving to get back home. Now, every night, Jon has to tell himself — you will get back to England, you will get back to England. Every reassurance, though, just magnifies the doubt.

  Jon has not heard from Cormac Tate since Broome, though Pete has kept up his practice of secret phone calls, whenever the opportunity arises. Jon is sure they have exchanged letters. For his own part, he does not care if he ever sees Cormac Tate’s face again. The old man would have seen him strung up for what happened in Broome — as if any of that, the Protection Officers, childsnatchers, the whole damn thing — was Jon Heather’s doing.

  The screen door slides open again, and Pete’s ugly mug appears on the veranda. He gestures wildly at the ute. ‘You can get your backsides inside now,’ he says, unable to wipe the grin off his face. ‘It’s a dinner. A bastard family dinner — and you two are both invited …’

  Rebekkah stands in a porch where little shoes are lined up in perfect rows, and an axe handle is propped against the wall. She is taller than Pete but, other than that, it might be as if Jon’s best friend has simply gone into the house and donned a wig.

  Pete marches ahead of Jon, turns on the spot like a soldier, so that he is standing abreast of Rebekkah. She looks askance at him, admonishing as a mother, and he launches into a sweeping introduction: this, Rebekkah — my sister Rebekkah — is my brother-in-arms, Jon Heather; this, Rebekkah — my sister Rebekkah — is Megan, Jon’s girl who’s come along for the ride. And this — he bounces to his haunches — is my goddamn niece.

  Rebekkah’s eyes flare: you’ll teach her bad language.

  The little girl, Elizabeth, hides behind her mother’s legs.

  ‘You coming on out?’ Pete grins. For some reason, he is on his hands and knees, like a dog. ‘I’ve got a sweet for you.’ He cranes his neck around. ‘Megan, have we got any sweets?’

  Megan shakes her head.

  ‘We’ll get you one,’ Pete says. ‘God damn Rebekkah, it’s good to see you …’

  Rebekkah swoops Elizabeth into her arms and invites them all through. As they go, she begins whispering to Pete out of the side of her mouth. Jon Heather hangs back. It is, he understands, exactly as if the fourteen years they have been parted mean nothing. The knowledge steels him, even if he has to fight back a horrible envy: if it can be this way for someone who has changed as much as Pete, it can be even better for him.

  Rebekkah sets them down in an open living room, at the back of which a stove and counter top make up the entire kitchen. It is not like any living room Jon would have, too wide and light, as if the whole world might be able to peer in. There are family photographs on the wall, but they are not the perfect
ly poised ones his mother used to have taken, just snaps somebody has taken of Rebekkah, Elizabeth and a slight, balding man in the back of a ute. There is no hearth, nor an old chest full of books; no lovably ancient armchair or coat draped over the banister rail. It is, Jon Heather decides, hardly a home at all.

  Rebekkah is pouring tea — not real tea; it smells of lemons — when suddenly she freezes. Jon is aware that something is wrong, but still he says nothing. Pete, too, is silent. At last, it is left to the little girl, wandering bewildered through these new faces, to venture over. She tugs at her mother’s dress.

  Slim and statuesque, Rebekkah turns around. She has not shed a tear, but it has been an epic ordeal to keep them in. ‘How on earth did you find me, Peter Slade?’

  ‘It was my old mate Cormac Tate. He’s been looking out for me ever since I crash-landed here. You’d like him, Rebekkah. Well, it was him figured it, in the end. We knew you was in Kununurra,’ says Pete, ‘but we … got a little waylaid …’

  They spend the afternoon lost in conversations — and, though Jon Heather and Megan barely say a word, it is enough to watch it unfold, breathing in the things brother has never known about sister and sister has never known about brother. It is a joy, too, to watch Pete lovingly belittled in the same way he has always treated Jon, the way he once treated a boy named George. She calls him a big girl, needles him with the point of her finger, recalls every time he fell over and cried or banged his head and threw a tantrum. She could list, all day, the times he made a fool of himself, and Pete would drink it in.

  In the early afternoon, Rebekkah’s husband arrives home. His name is James. He is older than her, scrawny and balding, with a great hook for a nose that suggests some sort of buzzard. If there is any handsomeness in him, it is in his soft, ovoid eyes, blue as the western oceans Pete and Jon have coasted up and down. Wearied from his day’s work at the construction site, he begins kicking his boots off in the porch. Elizabeth wriggles out of her mother’s lap and hurtles over, screaming out for him.

  James scoops Elizabeth up like a dirty pup, tosses her in the air to shrill cries of delight. On the third throw, he catches her and hangs her, like a bundle of kindling, under his shoulder. He looks up — and sees two strange men, scruffy and stinking to high heaven, staring at him.

  Standing on the cusp of the kitchen, Rebekkah gives a tiny shrug, as if to say: there’s something I have to tell you.

  ‘It’ll be you three’s dog that’s tearing up my yard, will it?’ he grins.

  At the dinner table, Pete tells Jon that they have been invited to stay. There isn’t much room, he says, but Rebekkah and James won’t take no for an answer: Elizabeth will sleep with her parents, and Pete will sleep in her crib. There’s a spare room, filled with boxes, but if Megan and Jon don’t mind bedrolls, they’re welcome to it. Better than the yard, Pete winks — James says they found a crocodile just basking there the day after they started building the place.

  ‘How long?’ Jon whispers. Around him, the table is set with foods he has never eaten: strange white sausages and sweet potatoes, a huge fish, its eyeball turned hard.

  Pete shrugs. ‘A few days,’ he reckons. ‘James says there might even be work, up at his construction site. They’ve been damming the river …’

  Before Jon can reply, James proposes a toast. Glasses are raised in honour of absent friends, and blood being thicker than water. Jon isn’t sure he follows either sentiment, but he drinks all the same. On the opposite side of the table, Elizabeth holds a tumbler as tiny as a thimble, filled with the same drink.

  Jon throws it back, splutters as it burns his throat. Looking at him reproachfully, Elizabeth sips hers daintily and smacks her lips.

  ‘It must have gone down the wrong way,’ mutters Jon, and turns to the big family fare he has never tasted before.

  After dinner, James brings in a cask of some dark liquor he has been brewing, and he and Pete drink, to the determined fussing of Rebekkah. She is, James insists, only complaining because, since Elizabeth, one of them has to remain sober. There was a time — and on this account he is enormously proud — when Rebekkah could drink him under the table. In fact, it was this very thing, in a roadhouse motel at the Victoria River crossing, which first threw them together. There isn’t many a man who would be proud that their wife might match him, drink for drink, and still be able to carry him home — but James is one of the gallant few, and Rebekkah one of the north’s real Australian heroes.

  At some ungodly hour, Megan, her eyes heavy, digs her elbow into Jon Heather’s shoulder. ‘Jon?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘We should leave them, Jon.’

  She is right, but he doesn’t like that she’s right. All the same, he nods.

  Jon takes her hand and allows himself to be hauled upright. As always with these vicious home brews, his legs are drunker than the rest of his body. He reels against Megan, she reels against him — and, in that way, they manage not to collapse in a crumpled heap.

  ‘Goodnight all,’ Megan says, leading Jon by the hand. ‘It’s so good of you to let us stay.’

  If they hear at all, they do not reply. As the family huddle together, Jon and Megan beat a stumbling retreat, half-falling and half-clambering their way up the stairs.

  In a backroom, where boxes are piled haphazardly against the walls, two bedrolls have been laid out, side by side. As Megan kicks off her boots, Jon Heather plunges onto the first one. He sits where he lands, not spreadeagled, but curled in a crooked ball.

  Through eyes heavy and tired, he watches Megan disrobe.

  ‘Tomorrow, Jon,’ she whispers, kissing him so that their lips only just brush, ‘I have to do it. I have to call my father.’

  She has timed her words well. Jon gives her that. He is suddenly kissing her back.

  ‘Please,’ he says, unbuttoning his shirt, ‘not yet. I just need a little more time. Something has to happen. As soon as I’m working again.’

  ‘He’ll be out of his mind. I’ve never done this kind of thing before.’

  Jon flops back, onto the bulge in the bedroll. Megan follows, as if to kiss him again. She has tried to contact her father before, only a day after they fled Broome, but her fingers were as useless as that day Pete tried to call his sister.

  ‘What difference does it make, a few more days, a week, two …’

  ‘You don’t know how he worries. I’m his only daughter.’

  A different look, something other than drunkenness, ghosts over Jon’s face. Momentarily, Megan draws back.

  ‘You’re right,’ Jon says. ‘You are right.’ Even so, suddenly Jon is pulling away from Megan, sitting up, scrabbling back into his shirt. He puts an arm around her, manoeuvres so that he is wrapped around her, instead of she around him. He whispers into her ear, ‘You can’t tell him, Megan. Tell him you’re OK, but don’t tell him where you are. Don’t tell him who you’re with.’

  ‘He knows who I’m with.’

  ‘He doesn’t,’ says Jon, lips brushing the back of her neck. ‘He thinks he does but …’

  A sudden thought hits him: you had a best friend once, Jon Heather, and that best friend, thinking you might leave him for good, had a terrible idea.

  ‘You wouldn’t tell him where we were, would you, Megan?’

  Their legs are entwined, their bodies pressed together, but Megan pulls herself free, pushing away from Jon so hard that the bedrolls separate and a gulf of empty floorboards opens between them.

  ‘What do you think of me, Jon? Would I have climbed into that ute if I was just going to turn you in?’

  There is nothing like knowing you are wrong, when you have been right all of your life, to make you feel guilty. Jon reaches out.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘Megan?’

  After a second, she gives in, takes his hand. The bedrolls draw back together, like two ships colliding at sea.

  ‘I just don’t want them knowing where we’re going.’

  He feels Megan tense against him.
She has stopped breathing. When she exhales, it is with a question that she must have had to steel herself to ask.

  ‘Where are we going, Jon?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well,’ she says, ‘we were coming here. And now we’re going there. But you haven’t told me where there is.’

  It is England, in the end. ‘Wherever there’s work, Megan.’

  ‘There could have been work in Broome, if …’

  Jon shushes her. He does not want to hear it. Not because of Cook, nor those girls, nor the thing he did that still makes his knuckles sore. There is, he has already decided, no earthly reason why bringing Megan along was better than staying with her in Broome, and working in the old hotel like she once offered. Back then, the thought had made him sick, that he might find himself staying for days and weeks and months in the Old Arabia, just because it was the easy, comfortable thing to do. Being with Megan now is all of those things and more. She changes things. She lights him up. She fills the long desert silences, when he and Pete can’t bear to talk. When he wakes every morning and she is there, it makes him think a day is worth it, even if there isn’t any work. This, he knows, is weakness: but it is glorious, beautiful weakness, sweeter than any victory he has yet to taste.

  They lie in silence, on a reef of alcohol and exhaustion.

  ‘Do you think she’s like Peter,’ Jon says. ‘His sister?’

  ‘I’ll tell you what I think. It’s the little girl — Elizabeth. She’s more like Pete than that sister of his. The way she squirms and wriggles, always on the move. The way there’s always a joke. She’ll grow up just like him.’

  ‘That,’ says Jon, with an air of defeat, ‘is exactly what I think.’

  Jon hardly sleeps that night. He listens to the cheering downstairs. Then he listens to the crying. He is not happy but he is not sad.

  On the second day, they ride into the sandstone hills, following a trail to look down on the fledgling town. Jon has never seen Dog so demented. Another yellow shape watches them from on high, and he sets up a bark that Jon has never heard before. Strange whoops return from the crevices above. Elizabeth is proud to show Pete a campsite that they have used before. She tells the story as pedantically as Jon might one of his own: her daddy brings her out here to spot birds. She can name every last one of them that live in these miniature mountains, and Pete, she is certain, won’t be able to name a single one.